Sunday, September 07, 2008

I built a brand new PC a few weeks ago, and getting my ASUS P5Q-E motherboard to work in Linux took a few tweaks. I had taken my harddrive out of my old PC and dropped it right into the new PC, expecting it to work. Ubuntu managed to start booting, but it hanged at the earliest bootup splash screen, where the progress bar bounces back and forth. GRUB had managed to boot the kernel image, but something was wrong - The kernel image couldn't find my hard disks, so it wasn't booting.

To solve this problem, I had to change the following BIOS options:

Under MAIN / Storage Configuration, I had to change "Configure SATA as ..." to [AHCI]. This allowed the kernel to find my disks and boot.

I experienced some weird USB problems while booting, and so under ADVANCED / USB Configuration, I had to change "BIOS EHCI Hand-Off" to [Disabled].

For good luck, I also made sure ACPI 2.0 was enabled under power saving.

Hopefully someone finds this useful. When I first booted and Ubuntu didn't boot, I thought to myself, "Damn, I should have checked if this new Intel chipset has good support in the kernel". I was worried the motherboard just wasn't going to work. However, after tweaking those BIOS options, things are working fine. +1 for Linux.

I got an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (seems to be a good balance of speed vs. price, also beats equally priced quad cores in many benchmarks), 2 gigs of 1200 MHz DDR2 (Kingston HyperX), and a VisionTek ATI Radeon 4850.

The 4850 is a really fast card, and again, is a good balance of speed/cost. The drivers on Linux are not very good though (fglrx). I've experienced some weird problems with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, as well as problems with switching between fullscreen and windowed mode in ioQuake3-based games (eg. Urban Terror, Tremulous). Also, if you run OpenGL-based screensavers, they'll kill X11 when you move the mouse. Yeah, so lots of problems with the drivers still, but hopefully they'll get better.

If you have the money, I'd maybe suggest getting an nVidia GTX 260. It's more expensive, but nVidia drivers are rock solid on Linux (the proprietary ones). I've had many nVidia cards without any problems on Linux, and based on my bad experience with the Ati card so far, I can't recommend it on Linux right now.

I also got the Linksys WUSB54GC USB wifi stick, and it's a total piece of garbage. It disconnects frequently and has these massive lag spikes when it periodically scans for networks or something. The same problem happens on Windows and Linux. The Vista drivers they ship on the CD for it disconnect every 5 seconds (no exaggeration), and I had to mess around with this rt73usb driver on Linux to get it half stable. The rt73 driver project is a complete mess too (even though Ralink supports them to some extent), so stay as far away from this USB wifi adapter as possible. Stick with a solid Atheros-based PCI card.

I'm planning to get one of the P5Q-E, P5Q or P5Q Pro for a Ubuntu Box and I'm looking for a graphic card which wouldn't freeze/crash X while running Compiz. I'm afraid it cannot be a Radeon 4850 (same problem will certainly happen with Compiz as with your OpenGL screensavers)Also I'm concerned about the PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse combo port on the P5Q-E (?). How is it supposed to work together with a PS/2 kvm switch ?I will probaly take the Intel Core Duo E8400 ( 3Gz, 6MB L2 cache, 45nm). I still cannot figure out why it is a bit cheaper than the others (maybe they produced it in massive quantities ).

I have the P5Q-E. Ubuntu livecd loads with the AHCI setting but it fails to see any HD device. I have 1 SATA, 2 PATA and 1 USB HD. WinXP Pro doesn't seem to have any issues. Mepis also has similar problem but does ID the SATA HD. Anyone know of a linux distro that works with the P5Q-E?

Also I was surprised to see the single PS/2 DIN connector. I tried a splitter to connect both mouse and keyboard but no joy. I bought a USB keyboard and used the DIN for my old Intellimouse. Seems to work well.

Uhhhh... Ubuntu does work with the P5Q-E (that's what this post was about).

I just installed the Catalyst 8.9 drivers and they're much better in Enemy Territory now, and I suspect some of the other things I complained about (eg. crashing OpenGL screensavers) might be fixed too. +1 for ATI. :)

Hi, after readign the article i felt a kind of relief. i too had to undergo same situation and finally got to call one of collegue to come and fix it. i thought if i you article would have come sometime back. thanks for info

Hemi: Suspend is working for me with the 8.9 Catalyst drivers and Ubuntu 8.04.1 with the P5Q-E. I haven't tried hibernate.

However, my wifi USB stick (the Linksys piece of trash) doesn't come back from suspend mode and I'll need to reboot to make it work. I believe it might actually be a bug in the USB chipset driver, but I'm not sure. Maybe it'll work under 8.10, I dunno.

Thanks very much for the BIOS ideas. I implemented them, not sure if they made a difference because I had already gotten Ubuntu to boot using the all_generic_ide parameter in grub. Oh, wait, I have a dual boot system and now XP won't boot. I'll revert and see what happens.

Thank you!Ubuntu 8.10 x64 installed like a charm, no problems at all!However, I would love to use the power saving programs ASUS provides...

Basic AI-tools (overclocking, fan control) and DriveXpert (for RAID/backup configuration) can be accessed via the BIOS but the energy saving features of the EPU 6-engine (like AI nap) can not - you need to install Windows drivers...

I am not using Windows so I am not profiting from these features, Motherboard and GPU always run at 100%.

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Wow, I wish I had found this a week ago. I had to install ubuntu with these options set, but once I did it worked like a charm! Thanks so much for posting your findings... I was about to give up on this motherboard until I found your post! :)